Furthermore, I do not hesitate to say that in nearly all Christian nations today, … religion is in danger of falling into the hands of the government. Not that sovereigns are terribly keen to establish dogma themselves, but they are increasingly usurping the will of those who explain dogma: they are depriving the clergy of its property and putting clergymen on salary, and they are using the priests’ influence and turning it to their own exclusive profit. They are turning clergymen into functionaries and, often, servants, and they are using the clergy to reach the deepest recesses of the individual soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville1
The concept of government is Foucault’s response to two complexes of problems – ‘state’ and ‘subjectivity’ – articulated in previous studies. Inasmuch as it failed to take sufficient distance from juridical notions, the ‘microphysics of power’ ultimately led to difficulties resembling the theoretical problems it was meant to subject to critique. In turn, the question arose about a centralized instance of power strong enough to discipline and fashion subjects. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of anything producing such cohesion, leaving it open how microstrategies achieve coordination and come together into the comprehensive technology of domination he implicitly assumed.
In order to do justice to this twofold problem, Foucault enlists a conception of government that does not view subjectivation and state formation as separate processes, but investigates them from a single analytical perspective.2 His methodological concern is to examine politico-legal forms of institutionalization as they bear on historical modes of subjectivation, without reducing the one to the other. In this framework, the state is not simply a legal structure. Instead, its defining trait, in modern times, is that it represents ‘both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power’.3 The ‘freedom’ of subjects and the ‘power’ of the state are not external to each other, but constitutively related. Accordingly, Foucault’s ‘genealogy of the modern state’ is also ‘a history of the subject’.4
Putting the task in these terms, Foucault’s 1978 lecture advances a historical argument: the modern (Western) state is the result of a complex combination of ‘political’ and ‘pastoral’ power. Whereas the former stems from the ancient polis and is organized in terms of rights and laws, universality, the civil sphere and so on, the latter represents a Christian conception, at the centre of which stands the comprehensive guidance of individual lives. If this premise is correct, then analysis of the modern state requires the examination of – over and above ‘political’ practices and forms of institutionalization – seemingly ‘private’ techniques elaborated within pastoral modes of guidance. Foucault argues that the idea of government as the leading of human beings, which prevailed up into the eighteenth century, goes back to the relationship, originating with Christianity, between a spiritual leader and his flock: pastoral power.5
Christian pastoral power possesses an array of qualities that set it apart from both Greco-Roman and Hebrew forms of government. As such, it is necessary not just to distinguish between government and other modes of exercising power – domination, exploitation and so on – but also to elaborate the difference between various conceptions of leadership and specifically Christian techniques of government.
In ancient Greek and Roman tradition, ‘government’ does not refer to leading human beings, but to ruling the city to which people belong. It involves steering a community – and not directly leading the human beings who belong to it. The prevailing image in ancient political theory is the ‘ship metaphor’, whereas the ‘shepherd metaphor’ proves only marginally significant. In classical political thought, leadership is symbolized by the captain steering the ship (i.e. the polis), not the sailors.6
The idea of government as the guidance of human beings was initially unknown to the Greeks and Romans. It first emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia and was subsequently elaborated among Hebrew tribes. Foucault emphasizes aspects of the Hebrew pastorate that contrast sharply with Greek techniques of government:
1. The Object of Government. The shepherd does not exercise power over a territory or a city, but a flock, a mobile mass of human beings. According to the Greek conception, the gods possess the land. The Hebrew pastor-god promises his flock a land that will one day belong to them. At the centre of Greek political thinking stands the idea of the commonwealth (Gemeinwesen). In the Hebrew conception, a pastor steers a herd of scattered individuals that exists only in and through his presence and action; without him, the flock would be lost and dissolve altogether.
2. The Purpose of Government. The pastor-god’s task is the salvation of his flock. Whereas assistance was sought from the Greek gods in times of danger, seeking help from the Hebrew shepherd does not represent an exception. In keeping with the scope of the idea of salvation, enduring, individualized and goal-oriented protection is necessary – comprehensive supervision of the entire flock and each one of its sheep (‘omnes et singulatim’).
3. The ‘Foundation’ of Government. The Hebrew pastorate rests on the principle that exercising power is a duty. Greek leaders were also supposed to make decisions in the interests of everyone and serve the community; the reward for fulfilling obligations was living on in the remembrance of the living. In contrast, the watchfulness of the shepherd stood closer to ‘devotion’ and ‘sacrifice’; it required that the leader give up his own interests and direct all attention to the weal of the flock.7
In turn, the Christian pastorate introduced a number of changes modifying the figures of Greco-Roman and Hebrew government. Above all, it arranged – or rearranged – certain elements (Salvation, Law and Truth):
1. Salvation. The Greek polis and the Hebrew flock presume the shared fate of the leader and those he leads. The Christian pastorate also has the idea of mutual obligation, but the relationship proves more paradoxical and complex. The Christian pastor does not work with a stable community of determinate human beings so much as within a subtle economy of sins and merits subordinate to the imperative of salvation. On the one hand, salvation is an individual affair; on the other, it does not represent a matter of free choice. Indeed, it is impossible to refuse salvation, or the path to it. Pastoral authority means forcing people, if need be, to do what is necessary to achieve salvation.
2. Law. The second change concerns obedience. Whereas Hebrews and Greeks allowed themselves to be led only by laws – or, alternatively, by persuasion/conviction – Christian pastorship introduces pure or generalized compliance: obedience for obedience’s sake. A means to an end becomes an end in itself: obedience no longer represents an instrument for attaining certain virtues, but becomes a virtue in itself: one obeys in order to achieve the state of obedience. Stripped of reference to anything outside itself, it receives the status of a fundamental virtue providing the precondition for attaining all other virtues.
At the same time, the Christian pastorate established, alongside the legal-political authority of tradition, a new way for analysing and judging conduct, at once more flexible and more finely woven than what preceded it. Another form of culpabilization arises, no longer functioning in a partial and temporary manner, but in enduring fashion and, in principle, without end. This strategy for assessing and evaluating human lives abstracts from concrete, individual actions and moves thoughts, volitions, wishes, desires and so on to the fore in order to provide correction and guidance. Constraint involving (moral and legal) laws is joined by the authority of a pastor whose constant supervision and spiritual custodianship alone guarantee the path to salvation.
3. Truth. For the Greeks, guidance was a matter of free will within temporal boundaries; it served the purpose of self-control. In contrast, Christian practice involves continual and compulsory guidance; self-examination and conscience do not serve to promote autonomy but to anchor dependency. Accordingly, exercising this form of power demands not just knowledge of what the flock – i.e. each of its members – does, but also knowledge about what individuals think and feel: insight into the conscience and the ability to steer it.
Christian pastorship developed an array of techniques and methods bearing on truth and its production. Knowing the inner truth of individuals represents the indispensable technical precondition for the ‘government of souls’. The pastor needs to have analytical methods – techniques of reflection and guidance – for securing such knowledge. Accordingly, the Christian pastorate works with a historically unique practice unknown elsewhere: comprehensive and thoroughgoing confession. As an institution, confession enables the examination of consciences: knowing inner secrets is indispensable for guiding souls. At the same time, it amounts to more than secrets being revealed; confession means not only taking stock of facts, but also producing truth. As such, it establishes a hierarchical distinction between secrets that have been disclosed, qualifying certain ‘truths’ as ‘hidden’. These truths make it possible to forge an enduring bond between the pastor, his flock, and each one of its members.8
The ‘genealogy of pastoral power’ proceeds in two steps. Initially, Foucault observes, aspects of Hebrew pastorship were taken up and changed. By this means, Christian pastorship forged techniques of guidance that later achieved a ‘political’ dimension extending far beyond their religious roots.
We can say that Christian pastorship has introduced a game that neither the Greeks nor the Hebrews imagined. A strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity; a game which seems to have nothing to do with the game of the city surviving through the sacrifice of the citizens.9
Yet appearances are deceiving. The form of power that Christian pastorship developed is not ‘political’ inasmuch as it aims for spiritual salvation in another world. Still, Foucault views pastoral power less in terms of its religious content than as a specific technology of power enabling human beings to be led. The path leading from the ‘government of souls’ to political government has passed, inasmuch as pastoral technology has been integrated into political form, to the modern state: ‘Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game – in what we call the modern states’.10
Foucault’s analytics of government is based on the premise that pastoral techniques of guidance elaborated forms of subjectivation on which the modern state and capitalist society subsequently built. However, this does not mean that the modern state is the necessary consequence of the Christian pastorate, nor that capitalism logically derives from the tendencies towards individualization that it inaugurated. Instead, Foucault’s point is that social and political upheavals in modernity should be viewed in terms of concurrent processes of totalization and individualization. The modern state is at once a legal-political structure and ‘a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power’ – that is, ‘a modern matrix of individualization, or a new form of pastoral power’.11
Foucault locates the historical transition from ‘governing souls’ to ‘governing human beings’ in the political and religious confrontations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements did not make the pastoral office disappear or cause church power to be transferred to the state. The opposite occurred: the pastorate was extended and generalized, gradually becoming detached from its religious origins. In addition, questions emerged outside, or ‘underneath’, the purview of church authority concerning people’s everyday lives, raising children, the institution of marriage, professional activity and so on. Philosophy – which had practically vanished during the Middle Ages, when it was subordinated to theology – underwent a renaissance, now offering answers to questions of proper conduct and how to live in an orderly fashion. In a word: the problem of government ‘exploded’ in a host of different forms; governing the state represented only one aspect.12
Foucault situates this development at the point of intersection between two historical processes that proved decisive for the problematic of government. On the one hand, feudal-estate structures had long been in decline, as states came to be centred in vast territorial and colonial empires. On the other hand, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation represent movements that called into question, time and again, how people are to be shown the path to salvation.13
The simultaneous concentration of state power and religious dispersion gave rise to an array of new problems concerning political sovereignty. Two questions in particular came to the fore: the scope and object of government, and the type of rationality to be employed for governing. In this context, when Foucault speaks of the ‘art of government’ or uses the neologism ‘governmentality’, he is referring to a shift of the politico-epistemological field that made this line of questioning both possible and necessary. In historical perspective, debate about the aim and rationality of government could arise only when government itself no longer counted as something ‘self-evident’. Only inasmuch as government represented a problem could ‘governmentality’ – that is, reflection on the conditions of government – emerge as an item of contention. In turn, ‘art of government’ points to the artificial nature of guidance that has left behind the theologico-cosmological continuum, where the ‘natural state’ of things does not require any such reflection – or, more precisely, makes it utterly inconceivable.14
Foucault sees the first attempt to answer the question concerning an ‘art’ of government in reason of state, which emerged in the sixteenth century and simultaneously inaugurated a new object of political action and a distinct form of rationality.15 Reason of state represents the ‘point of formation, of crystallization’16 of the art of government and, it turns out, an obstacle to its further development. When it emerged, it defined ‘a rationality specific to the art of governing states’17 vastly exceeding the limited scope and negative meaning it came to possess later on. Initially, reason of state counted as something new, innovative and scandalous: ‘raison d’état’ was ‘raison diabolique’. Inasmuch as its calculations followed ‘political reason’ alone – which discards theological considerations – ‘political sectarians’ were thought to be atheists or polytheists.18 Foucault illustrates the striking break that ratio status represented vis-à-vis ratio pastoralis through the example of De regno, by Thomas Aquinas. This medieval work presents the king’s rule over his people by way of three analogies: God, nature and the father of a family. The sovereign can govern only to the extent that he forms part of a theologico-cosmological continuum that extends from God down to human beings, via nature. Just as God directs Creation, the soul the body, and the father the family, the king must, like a shepherd, lead human beings to their destiny (spiritual salvation in another world). As such, this form of government possesses nothing specific about it; it is neither conceptionally nor practically autonomous: ‘Saint Thomas’s model for rational government is not at all a political one’.19
This continuum is precisely what fell apart during the sixteenth century: Copernican astronomy, Galileo’s physics and the grammar of Port-Royal all sought to demonstrate that God governs the world through general and universal laws that are intelligible and can be explained by the rules of logic, mathematics and grammar. Nature – which formerly consisted of miracles, analogies and signs – turned into something calculable. The cosmos, following simple laws held to be universal and rational, no longer belonged to a shepherd leading his flock to salvation, but to a lawgiver, or sovereign.20
The discovery of general regularities in nature and language occurred in parallel to the emergence of a special status for politics. The new idea held that the sovereign’s relationship to his subjects does not continue the divine continuum on earth: it differs from the relationship between God and nature, the father and his children, and the shepherd and his flock. In this unprecedented, political framework, the sovereign no longer has the task of leading people to salvation. Instead, he should direct them within an autonomous field: the state and reason of state constitute the elements of a new ‘art’, which has no model as yet.21
Reason of state broke with Christian tradition, yet it did not accept the answer proposed in The Prince concerning government’s foundations and goals. Between 1580 and 1650, Machiavelli stood at the centre of political debates about the art of government. Not just opponents of reason of state, but also its adherents rejected the ‘solution’ he had offered. Even though Machiavelli presented a rational form of government that no longer made recourse to natural or divine law, his conception proved limited insofar as it was oriented entirely on the person of the prince and served the latter’s passions and interests: ‘Machiavelli’s entire analysis is aimed at defining what keeps up or reinforces the link between prince and state, whereas the problem posed by reason of state is that of the very existence and nature of the state itself’.22
Like Machiavelli, theorists of raison d’état sought to take distance from an art of government based on religious schemes of justification. However, they also wanted to elaborate a new type of governmental rationality that would not be subordinate to rules. Reason of state looks for a form of rationality free from external determinants: ‘the art of government eschews theological and cosmological foundations and avoids recourse to the person of the prince; instead, it defines a sphere of autonomous rationality that must find its principles within itself’.23
Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century political theory defines reason of state as a specific art (or technology) corresponding to certain rules that, instead of representing custom or tradition, belong to the realm of rational knowledge.24 Two key aspects distinguish such ‘political reason’.
First, it makes no reference to human, divine or natural laws. The state, and the state alone, stands as the object and measure of such rationality: ‘the state is governed according to rational principles that are intrinsic to it and cannot be derived solely from natural or divine laws or the principles of wisdom and prudence. The state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort’.25 Just as principiae naturae must be sought in nature, the principles of the state must be sought in the state itself. In this respect, the new rationality proves ‘reflective and perfectly aware of its specificity’.26
Second, reason of state breaks with the idea of external finality and secularizes formerly religious goals: happiness, salvation, prosperity and so on can only be achieved within the state, inasmuch as one subordinates oneself to it and obeys its institutions. According to Foucault, the defining trait of reason of state is to have taken up the themes of Christian pastorship (salvation, obedience and truth) and resituated them in a ‘political’ problematic of directing human beings.27
Inasmuch as reason of state derives from neither divine wisdom nor the interests of the prince, but is based on rationality belonging to the state alone, a new relationship emerges between politics-as-practice and politics-as-knowledge. Reason of state calls for knowledge that differs in essence from traditional forms. It is no longer enough for kings to be judges, philosophers or clerics. Instead, the leader of others must be a ‘politician’: in the position to enlist specific, political expertise distinct from moral, juridical or theological authority. Inasmuch as the state constitutes a natural entity existing in its own right (that is, it holds no obligations vis-à-vis human or divine laws, nor does it derive from them), governing the state requires specialized knowledge of its specific properties and workings.28
The notion of strength (force) stands at the centre of this epistemological shift. In the framework of reason of state, government is possible only when the strength of the state and the means to increase it are clear (as well as the strengths and weaknesses of other states). It is no longer possible to invoke general principles (divine wisdom, human reason, natural law and so on). Concrete, measurable knowledge is required; instead of being determined in reference to transcendental principles, it achieves definition in terms of immanent relations of force. As such, reason of state means developing a historically unprecedented complex of analyses and techniques of measurement: organizing practical knowledge centred on the state and its strength, the elements composing it, its resources and so on. Such knowledge is afforded by ‘statistics’ – the science of the state – mercantilism and cameralism.29
This shift in the regime of knowledge corresponds to a changed aim of government. The concept of strength establishes an unprecedented kind of ‘politics’ with the objective of calculating and using the state’s forces. The central idea is no longer quantitative expansion of territory and legal borders; instead, focus falls on concentrating and enhancing resources in order to increase might. The ‘physics of the state’ replaces the rightful rule of the sovereign. Accordingly, the art of governing can no longer be limited to preserving the status quo and securing what already stands. It aims for continual fortification of the state: simply preserving the given order, when one is surrounded by enemies, would lead to ruin. Only by maintaining and expanding might can the state live and survive in competition with other states. As such, raison d’état means rational government ‘in accordance with the state’s strength’.30
A wholly transformed model of history underlies this reorientation. The state no longer has any goal outside itself. Religiously motivated and absolute eschatology, tying history to its fulfilment, yields to unlimited time and space; now, individual states fight for survival. In other words, a constantly imperilled eschatology of ‘universal peace’ nourished by the relativity of forces emerges. Such a peace does not derive from the unity of the church or empire – with rival territories vanishing in light of a ‘kingdom of heaven’. On the contrary, it presumes a multiplicity of independent and autonomous states, none of which is strong enough to dominate the others.31
At the same time, such a political order does not achieve definition through a permanent state of war; instead, it aims for a certain balance of power. The corollary of strengthening the state is arriving at a point of equilibrium: a ‘static’ dimension complements and completes political dynamics. The new political perspective requires the implementation of two arrangements representing both the condition for such dynamics and their direct consequence. One concerns the relationship between states, and the other functions within the individual state.
Maintaining order externally requires two apparatuses that complement and secure each other: abiding military potential and diplomacy.32 Inasmuch as the goal of the military-diplomatic dispositive is to maintain an external balance between states – each of which seeks to increase its forces – it entails the problem of cultivating strength as much as possible without endangering order within. ‘Police’ is the name for efforts to resolve the matter.
The meaning of ‘police’ that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in Germany and France, does not have much in common with the narrow and largely negative set of tasks to which the term now refers (foiling crime, averting danger and so on).33 At the time, police designated a specific sphere of activity with its own, particular methods. It did not refer to ‘an institution or mechanism functioning within the state, but [to] a governmental technology’.34 The goal was to preserve – or, if possible, improve – the state’s position on the overall field of competition and secure peace within by ensuring individuals’ ‘welfare’. That said, the two objectives were not equal in status, nor did they exist independently. Rather, the two aims were interconnected: ‘police’ was understood as a general ‘technology of state forces’.35
The particularity of police technology lies in the way the relationship between the state and individuals is conceived, as well as the reversal that such rationality implies. Individual happiness and prosperity no longer stand as the goal of a good government, but represent the necessary precondition for the state’s strength and survival. That is, consequence and result turn into an instrument and a condition. The central paradox of this kind of ‘welfare state’ involves ‘develop[ing] those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state’.36
The idea of happiness, or prosperity, provides the principle for identifying state and subjects. In this context, ‘police’ – in contrast to religious or moral government – does not directly address individual life, death, labour or morality; rather, it views the latter elements indirectly, in terms of their positive or negative contribution to the state’s well-being. Police represents ‘a kind of political marginalism, since what is in question here is only political utility’.37 At the same time, however, the police’s sphere of activity does not stop at the individual and his or her pursuits. It does not constitute a border so much as, in fact, it suspends all abstract borders and multiplies possible spheres and modes of intervention.
Contemporary regulations and theoretical treatises make it plain that the realm of policing tends towards infinity.38 The sphere of potential police intervention ‘branches out into all of the people’s conditions, everything they do or undertake. Its field comprises justice, finance, and the army’; ‘[t]he police’s true object is man’ (Turquet de Mayerne). ‘The police sees to everything regulating “society” (social relations) carried on between men’; it seeks ‘to lead man to the utmost happiness to be enjoyed in this life’ (Delamare). The writings of von Hohenthal and Willeband describe the vast array of problematic realms in need of regulation, ranging from religion, morality, security and healthcare to city planning and the manual trades. Von Justi elaborates the difference between politics and policing. The former, in his eyes, is basically a negative undertaking that involves the state’s fight against inner and outer enemies, whereas the latter represents a positive task: promoting the life of citizens and the polity’s robustness.39
That said, the domain of police intervention remains strangely undefined. The multiplicity of, and variation between, its objects leaves it unclear where, precisely, policing makes its contribution or what, exactly, this contribution is. At the same time, the significance of policing lies in this same generality and indeterminacy: in principle, it regulates all forms of human life in community. Possible objects and potential spheres of intervention are not that important; people and property do not occupy the foreground so much as the relations between them and the quality of these relations. ‘Policing’ focuses on communal life in a single space, property relations, production, exchange and so on – in particular, the human being as a working and industrious creature, a living being (Lebewesen). As such, its sphere of intervention cannot be limited to ‘public’ matters. Indeed, the distinction between public and private spheres (and therefore the restricted, largely negative meaning of police) emerged only in the context of eighteenth-century bourgeois society, marking the transition from the ‘police state’ to the liberal state.40
The police state is closely tied to the notion of the strength of the polity. It pursues a specific goal: proper policing assures that people are able to exist, and in as great a number as possible, that they have a livelihood and do not die at an excessive rate, and so on. At the same time, ensuring life is not just a matter of material subsistence: ‘The role of the police is to supply [the state] with a little extra strength. This is done by controlling “communication”, i.e. the common activities of individuals (work, production, exchange, accommodation)’.41 ‘Police’ means that all the technologies guaranteeing ‘better living’ also preserve and heighten the state’s resources. As such, it may be understood as a secularized form of pastoral power, looking after everything and everyone and leading subjects to an (economically) sensible life: in other words, economic pastorship.42
The new governmental technology of police emerged in tandem with a new epistemological object, as well as a new ‘political personage’: population.43 On the one hand, population constituted the object of scientific analysis and political intervention; on the other, it represented the condition for the polity’s wealth and, as such, a privileged element in state politics. According to theorists of police, policing and policy, it had to be integrated into a regulatory apparatus to ensure that it would work productively. Conversely, productivity was guaranteed only inasmuch as the population came to be trained, stabilized and regulated. This meant, for example, fixing salaries, preventing immigration, reducing infant mortality or averting epidemics – all of which entailed developing certain forms of knowledge such as medicine, demography, hygienic regimes and so on. The world of the police was a world of comprehensive regulation and individual disciplination, and it called for permanent supervision and surveillance in order to ensure the public weal.
However, the ‘population’ – as subject and object in one – is what exposed the limits of reason of state and led to a ‘blockade’ of the art of government in the seventeenth century. Alongside ‘massive and elementary historical causes’44 such as the Thirty Years War, urban and peasant revolts, and financial crisis, two internal problems brought this form of government to an end.
The first was the right of sovereignty. The police cannot be separated from a theory and practice of government that provided a certain economic technology by calculating the relative strength of competing European states: mercantilism. Although mercantilism represents the ‘first rationalization of exercise of power as a practice of government’45 inasmuch as it tied the state’s prosperity to individual welfare, it was less interested in the land’s well-being per se than in augmenting the sovereign’s wealth and power.
Mercantilism sought to reconcile the art of government and sovereignty. Specifically, it aimed to derive principles of government from a reinvigorated theory of sovereignty. Conceptions of contractuality and natural law that had emerged in the seventeenth century were supposed to create the basis for a new form of government within an old institutional framework by forging mutual obligations between the sovereign and his subjects. This model of compromise was destined for failure inasmuch as governing the population required forms of regulation and modes of intervention tending to exceed the operating potential of absolutism.
The second problem was the household economy. Mercantilism remained indebted not just to a legal framework conceived in terms of sovereignty, but also to the economic model of the household. It sought to establish a kind of ‘economic sovereignty’, whereby the economy would possess its own rationality, even if it was not (yet) autonomous. The couple formed by prosperity and population did not take the stage as a self-sufficient machine that government could simply employ for its purposes; instead, the interrelationship had to be reworked again and again, and constantly monitored and maintained. Mercantilism set up an economic scheme that remained indebted to the old frameworks of oikos and domestic governance. Here, the economy did not constitute an autonomous reality with laws of its own and built-in regulatory mechanisms. On the contrary, the sovereign was its ‘owner’ and ‘landlord’.46
Thus, notwithstanding the epistemologico-political breaks that reason of state effected, the art of government remained caught between two models: ‘On the one hand, there was this framework of sovereignty, which was too large, too abstract, and too rigid; and, on the other, the theory of government suffered from its reliance on a model that was too thin, too weak, and too insubstantial, that of the family’.47 Mercantilism, as a means of increasing wealth, relied on the classical tools of sovereignty – just like the police: even if its interventions no longer appealed to juridical logic, it enlisted procedures and instruments borrowed from the juridical world: laws, decrees and commands. Only with the rise of new phenomena specific to the population did it become possible to focus the concept of economy on something other than the family and expose the inadequacy of these models for regulatory intervention.
At the start of the seventeenth century, the ‘political sect’ emerged and formulated a new form of political rationality: reason of state. A hundred years later, new heretics appeared and took issue with the instruments of the police state: the economists. Physiocrats and cameralists did not invoke political reason; instead, they appealed to a specifically ‘economic’ reason. For all that, the new form of governmentality did not make a complete break with tradition; instead it modified, or reorganized, reason of state and the disciplines.48
Foucault illustrates the course taken by the police state’s critics on the example of famine. For mercantilists, famine could be predicted but not prevented inasmuch as it remained caught up in juridico-moral categories. According to this view, scarcity was God’s punishment and stemmed from the evil nature of humankind. Accordingly, a juridico-disciplinary system was established to counter the shortage of foodstuffs: price regulations, laws about storage, transport and so on. These practices aimed to produce as much inexpensive grain as possible and sell it abroad in order to import gold, which the sovereign would then have at his disposal. The system miscarried, however: peasants regularly went to ruin by generating a surplus of grain; they were forced to plant less, leading to a lack of food the following year.49
The physiocrats reacted to this failure by making decisive changes to the inherited juridico-moral system. Their point of departure was the ‘nature of things’, not the (evil) nature of man. From this perspective, famine counted as a natural phenomenon, and combating it meant taking the fact of varying crops and resources as the point of departure. In contrast to mercantilists, physiocrats claimed that grain must command a good price in order to avert famine: if this happens and prices climb, they will not do so forever; at a certain point, they reach a ‘natural’ price (as opposed to the ‘just’ price of the Middle Ages).
Whereas mercantilists, making innumerable prescriptions and laws, had assumed that matters prove infinitely flexible and admit regulation at will, physiocrats held that an autonomous, ‘natural’ law exists – ‘physis’, which cannot be changed. Any intervention in the course of nature disturbs, indeed worsens, things. From this perspective, policing is not only impossible, it is unnecessary: matters regulate themselves on their own. Physiocrats sought to replace a (juridical) regime with (natural) regulation. They faulted mercantilism for not offering a solution so much as a problem: instead of preventing famines, the juridico-disciplinary system produced them by disregarding the ‘nature of things’. In order to act in conformity with nature, regulation and fixed prices are not called for – on the contrary, free prices, trade and export are required.50
The key difference between mercantilists and physiocrats lies in their opposing perspectives on that singular subject-object, population. Whereas mercantilists located the population on the axis of ruler/ruled and viewed it as a legal subject, physiocrats viewed the population as a sum of natural processes – accordingly, it must be treated on a natural basis. Whereas mercantilists thought there could never be enough population, physiocrats did not consider population to be an absolute value so much as a relative quantity: there is need for a suitably large labour force, but it should not be too large, since this would mean decline in income. The ‘right’ balance cannot be set once and for all; fortunately, it is also unnecessary to do so, since matters ‘sort themselves out’ on their own. This ‘naturalness’ of the population, which the physiocrats ‘discovered’, has several dimensions:
1. The ‘natural’ quality of the population lies in its relative diversity. For the physiocrats, population is not a given, fixed quantity – raw social material – so much as a dependent variable admitting change in keeping with conditions (e.g. climate, geography, trade, laws and habits). Consequently, the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects cannot be a matter of obedience/revolt; rather, ‘population’ has the tendency to escape the will of the sovereign inasmuch as its natural facticity dictates the conditions and limits for any possible intervention.
2. Accordingly, any action must take this feature as the point of departure. But even though the exact behaviour of individuals cannot be determined in advance, a driving force remains constant, which can be counted on and provides the basis for intervention: desire (‘le désir’). The natural quality of desire defines the population and renders it ‘permeable’ to technologies of power. Governing the population on the basis of its natural desire represents the exact opposite of the juridico-moral programme of sovereignty. If, formerly, the sovereign had the task of negating desire and imposing limits, the physiocrats identified the problem of affirming it: what can stimulate, push forward and multiply popular desire?
3. Population is also natural because of its regularity: the abiding proportion of men and women, consistent mortality rates, accidents, cases of illness and so on. In this framework, statistics discarded the inherited ‘science of the state’ and investigated the new reality of ‘population’ by way of ‘natural properties’. The latter display a distinct kind of materiality; they are more than the sum of individual parts and cannot be boiled down to the familial model. In this context, human life became the object of an entirely new knowledge-formation: the human sciences, which seek to determine the abiding, regular features of ‘man’.51
However, when physiocrats invoked ‘naturalness’, they were not appealing to a remainder of tradition, or a premodern relic. The call signalled a new epoch of history. During the Middle Ages, proper government had belonged to the ‘natural’ order foreseen by God. Such a conception of nature, which tied political thinking into a cosmological continuum, was discarded by early modern theorists of reason of state, who, in replacing it with an artificial ‘Leviathan’, garnered opprobrium for putative atheism. In turn, the economists reintroduced ‘naturalness’. But now, nature referred to something different, which had nothing more to do with the divine plan for Creation. Instead of the divinely ordained cosmos, a natural world stood at issue – which had not existed previously and was now ‘discovered’ and set in opposition to police (‘If prices rise, they’ll level off again on their own’). Just as the police state had followed a prescription to secure order it had authored itself, the new governmentality had to bring forth naturalness by artificial means. To this end, it looked to human life in community – labour, trade and so on: the naturalness of emergent ‘society’. Not the paradigm of law or discipline so much as the model of the market and freely circulating people and commodities provided the point of orientation.
But for all that, the physiocratic art of government remained within the horizon of sovereignty; the natural quality of social processes continued to have an index in the ruler. From the mid-eighteenth century on, liberal critiques time and again exposed the limits of physiocratic technology, which equated the sovereign’s knowledge and the freedom of (economic) subjects in an effort to preserve the appearance of harmony between politics and economy. In turn, a new, ‘liberal’ art of government assigned singular significance to ‘political economy’: a form of rationality providing the basis for a new governmentality – and, at the same time, the principle restricting its scope.52
In the mid-eighteenth century, transformations led to a new stage of governmental thinking: liberalism, which called for individual ‘freedom’. That said, its premise was not personal freedom so much as a principle of governmentality seeking to produce what it described as already being in existence. Liberalism did not take stock of actual facts so much as it represented a body of knowledge, or programme, for designing a new scheme of relations between rulers and those they ruled.
The defining feature of liberalism is that individuals count as the object of governmental practice and, simultaneously, its necessary (and voluntary) partners – ‘accomplices’. In this framework, governmental activity is tied to actions on the part of the individuals governed. In other words, the government’s rational activities must accord with individual actions, which are rational and motivated by self-interest, because the (economic) rationality of private parties is what enables the market to function in keeping with its true nature. Ultimately, such rationality ensures the welfare of the state: when the market functions naturally, it functions in the best possible way, and when it functions in the best possible way, it promotes the state’s strength. Accordingly, liberal government breaks with the simple application of technologies of domination that had defined reason of state and the police state. The external opposition between power and subjectivity yields to an inner bond: this principle of government demands the ‘freedom’ of the ruled, and rational use of freedom represents the condition for ‘economic’ government. The art of liberal government consists of replacing outward, legal restriction with internal regulation: political economy.
Political economy no longer analyses governmental practices from the standpoint of the law, but looks to their actual effects. (It is not a matter of whether the sovereign is justified in raising taxes, or whether it is legitimate to do so, but what happens when taxes are raised – in general, for a certain group, and so on.) In contrast to the physiocratic position, nature no longer represents an autonomous realm where, in principle, no intervention should occur. Rather, ‘nature’ itself depends on governmental action; it is not a material substrate, where governmental practices find application, but their correlate and reverse. Political economy replaces reflection on the inner laws of nature with thought bearing on the nature of governmental practices’.53
As for reason of state, police, mercantilism and so on, Foucault does not understand liberalism as an economic theory, political ideology or social utopia so much as a thought-through practice: ‘Liberalism … is to be analysed as a principle and method of the rationalization of the exercise of government’.54
Liberalism did not simply ‘invent’ an inner principle of governmental action. Rather, it defined this principle with regard to a projected, outer goal. In contrast to reason of state, the point of departure is not the fact that states exist and grow; the premise that the state has an immanent goal and seeks to strengthen itself no longer holds. Unlike the regime of police, liberal governmentality does not fear that ‘too little government’ is in place (say, because countless social spheres lack rules and prescriptions, provisions are not sufficiently detailed or the administrative apparatus is not elaborate enough). Instead, it inverts the perspective: liberalism affirms that ‘there is too much government’ and asks why the state exists – and what aims it serves. For theorists of reason of state, the state already had criteria for determining what is good and right (e.g. strengthening itself and optimizing available instruments of rule). Liberalism effected a shift rich in consequences. It introduced, for the first time, a ‘critical’ principle that went far beyond assessing optimization efforts. Under liberal governmentality, practices are not examined only in terms of the best available means, or lowest costs, for achieving goals, but also in terms of the possibility and legitimacy of the procedures used to achieve these aims – and whether these aims are themselves legitimate.
This orientation signals a complete change in the problematic of government. The question ‘Why is it necessary to govern?’ can only arise inasmuch as the putative unity between the state and the art of government has dissolved. The question would make no sense in the context of reason of state or police science. It means that the art of government now aims at something other than itself – it no longer possesses internal justification or counts as ‘self-evident’, but must find validity with respect to something else. As such, the liberal art of government cannot be separated from a new problematic that emerged during the eighteenth century: society. In the name of this new, epistemologico-political object, liberal thinking examined practices of government to determine whether they were necessary and useful or, on the contrary, superfluous – if not harmful. Whereas reason of state had pursued political optimization by maximizing the state, liberalism worked with society – and not the state. It meant asking, ‘What makes government necessary, and what ends must it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its own existence?’.55
Foucault approaches the question by way of three thematic complexes that define the liberal art of government: knowledge, subjectivity and power.
The premise of political economy is that the practices of government have their own nature, which they must respect. In other words, governmental action should harmonize with the laws of a nature that it produces. Hereby, the principle shifts from being oriented on outward congruency to focusing on inner regulation: it is no longer legitimacy or illegitimacy but success or failure that form the coordinates of governmental action; the centre of reflection no longer bears on human presumption or misuse of power, but inadequate knowledge of how it works. With that, political economy introduces to the art of government, and for the first time, the question of truth and the demand for self-limitation as fundamental principles. The problem no longer concerns how the prince should rule in keeping with divine, natural, and/ or moral laws; nor is the question the same one that reason of state had posed – about maximizing the state’s powers. Instead, the point is to understand the ‘nature of things’, which simultaneously determines the possibilities and limits of governmental activity.56
Thus, Foucault does not view political economy as a theory of governmental action so much as a ‘mechanism of truth-formation’; in this context, it is the market that produces such truth. Whereas, until the mid-eighteenth century, the market represented a ‘site of jurisdiction’ subject to legal and moral categories (e.g. ‘fair prices’), it now becomes a ‘site of veridiction’. The market is supposed to obey ‘natural’ mechanisms that enable a ‘natural’ price to emerge, expressing a certain relationship between the costs of production and the expectations of demand. The market turns into a site where the truth reveals itself, and ‘good’ government must act according to this truth. The criteria for the rightness or falseness of practices are oriented on the market, which functions as the site where government action is verified or proven false. Until this point, the market was tied into a moral-juridical continuum assigning it an epistemologico-political station; now it represents an instance for judging and evaluating government.57
Liberal government implies permanent reference to truth. That said, such truth no longer means external conformity to divine law or an originary, natural order. Instead, its index lies in the reality of human behaviour (in other words, reality that is historical and mutable). Foucault identifies two stages of this transformation. The first stage was marked by the immediate proximity between reason of state and police science. The latter displayed a pragmatic orientation and was a matter of application; lacking epistemological autonomy, it followed the calculations of the state and served to increase its forces. In principle, a seamless police apparatus monitored society and regulated every aspect of life. The second stage, according to Foucault, followed the physiocratic thesis, elaborated in contradistinction to the idea of an artificial ‘Leviathan’, that human society constitutes a kind of second nature. Accordingly, physiocrats demanded that society be ruled only in keeping with ‘natural’ laws, whose autonomy any and all forms of government must respect; in this framework, the principle of laissez-faire serves to counter an all-inclusive apparatus of surveillance and regulation.
And yet, physiocratic critique did not surpass reason of state inasmuch as it, too, was defined by the theoretical accordance of knowledge and government: if the sovereign grants his subjects liberties, he can afford to do so because he already knows everything that is happening at a given moment. The appeal to laissez-faire was made in the context of despotic sovereignty that was no longer bound by divine laws, traditions and customs – only by the knowledge it shared with economic agents. If Quesnay’s tableau had enabled the sovereign to supervise the entirety of economic processes within the state, then Adam Smith’s thesis of the ‘invisible hand’ represented a radical critique of this way of conceiving the connection between economic freedom and despotic sovereignty; it demonstrated the impossibility of the physiocratic idea of ‘economic sovereignty’.58
Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is neither a symbol of optimism nor a theological relic. In a seeming paradox, it combines public welfare with private egoism and posits a productive relationship between the prosperity of all and the pursuit of private interests. According to Foucault, however, the innovative force of Smith’s image does not lie in the idea of the ‘hand’ (that is, a coordinating instance directing the multiplicity of individuals to ensure the public weal) so much as that of ‘invisibility’. In other words, the hand’s invisibility does not stand for a shortcoming; rather, it constitutes a necessary and indispensable condition for bringing about public welfare. The ‘invisible hand’ can achieve its goals only inasmuch as, and because, it is invisible: not being seen is the condition for its success. The public weal is ensured only when individual actors do not seek it out as a way of measuring what they do, but follow egoistic interests. For Smith, economic rationality is not hampered by the impossibility of taking the totality of the economic process into account; on the contrary, such ignorance founds economic rationality in the first place, since the economic world is by nature opaque.
The key point is that the effectiveness of the ‘invisible hand’ does not extend to economic actors alone; it also establishes a mechanism enabling it to act as a paradigm of the social order in general. In this framework, society may be conceived as a totality independent of the state. Not just individual economic actors, but political rule will necessarily fail if it tries to realize the national weal directly. Such incapacity on the part of the state stems from the impossibility of keeping watch over the totality of economic processes. The limitation of state power follows directly from its limited knowledge: if it is already impossible for the state to watch over economic processes, how is it supposed to be able to steer them?59
The Wealth of Nations, then, is also a ‘critical’ undertaking in the Kantian sense: a ‘critique of state reason’. Just as Critique of Pure Reason exposes the limits of human knowledge with regard to the cosmos, Smith’s work demonstrates the state’s inability to grasp the totality of economic processes. But like Kant, Smith does not stop at a (negative) determination. If Kant’s insight into the unattainability of the Ding an sich leads him to explore the possibilities of human knowledge, for Smith the impossibility of economic sovereignty defines the condition of the state’s existence and assigns it its principle of legitimacy. In liberalism, the state does not have the task of directing and surveilling the economic sphere, but regulating it in keeping with the rules that prevail here. The state no longer dictates the law for the economy, but governs according to economic law.60
And with that, the immediate, pragmatic unity of knowledge and government – which defined reason of state and police science – falls apart and makes room for a complex relationship between (autonomous) scientific knowledge and an art of government that is wholly separate in principle. Political economy offers a body of knowledge that governmental practices must incorporate, if they are to prove successful. Conversely, it does not develop any detailed programmes for guiding governmental practices or directing how they are carried out. Political economy defines a form of knowledge closely tied to the art of government (tête-à-tête), but it cannot constitute the latter.61
Still, political economy does not demonstrate ‘objectivity’ because it adopts a standpoint independent of politics in principle, but because it affords a new form for objectivating the reality of ruling, which situates governmental action in a new politico-epistemological configuration: the space of (civil) society, on the one hand, and a new form of subjectivity, on the other.
Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests describes how, in the post-feudal world, the manifest failure of moral enjoinders and religious commandments led to various ideas for implementing comparatively harmless forms of behaviour in order to neutralize other, more dangerous ones. In this context, the term ‘interest’ was coined for impulses deemed to possess an equilibrating or regulating function. In the course of the eighteenth century, the idea came to prevail that ‘one set of passions, hitherto known variously as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust’.62
In similar fashion, Foucault works out the relationship between the concept of interest and a new form of subjectivity that emerged in eighteenth-century British empiricism – one defined neither by free will, nor by the opposition between body and soul, but by inherent ‘interests’. In this framework, the subject appears as the bearer of individual preferences, which prove just as irreducible as they are untransferable; personal choice does not admit being traced back to more fundamental principles, nor can it be replaced or restricted. The new concept of interest refers to a form of will that is immediate and subjective at one and the same time. It cannot be derived from juridical will; indeed, it differs radically from it.
On the basis of the writings of David Hume and Jeremy Bentham, Foucault demonstrates the irreducibility of interest and the difference between the interest-subject and the legal subject, whose points of reference are the market and the contract, respectively. Whereas the theory of social contract holds that individuals renounce their original and natural rights in an act of transfer, Hume argues that such a regulation can be accepted only inasmuch as it counts as temporary and may be revoked at any time. As he observes in his Treatise of Human Nature, the basis for such a contract cannot be the contract itself, nor can it lie in the capacity to bind or modes of obligation. Instead, it is interest that makes concluding a contract advantageous and useful at a given moment. However, the self-same interest will dissolve the contract when such conditions no longer hold and the contract presents an obstacle to pursuing one’s own wishes. Accordingly, the interest-subject permanently transcends the self-imposed limitations of the legal subject.63
Thus, the liberal art of government faces the problem of defining a political space for sovereignty and determining its object, given the structural heterogeneity between legal and economic subjectivity. Theoretically, there are two solutions that would ‘harmonize’ both these principles:
1. Reducing the extent of regulation. One solution would be to restrict regulatory efforts and leave the structure of government intact. If the totality of economic processes eludes sovereignty, then exercising such sovereignty might be limited spatially, as it were: it would be valid everywhere, except in the sphere of the market.
2. Moving from political activity to theoretical passivity. Another possibility (and this was the physiocrats’ position) would be to change the form of government itself. The sovereign would adopt a bearing vis-à-vis the market analogous to a geometer’s view with respect to geometrical realities. On the one hand, the sovereign acknowledges the market and its immanent laws, but on the other he assumes a position granting him abiding and complete control of processes here.64
That said, against the backdrop of the manifest incompatibility of the principles of sovereignty and the market – as well as the question of how to rule individuals who live as both legal and economic subjects – such efforts to strike a ‘balance’ between homo legalis and homo œconomicus prove unsatisfactory. In the one case, the sovereign is reduced to being an organ for carrying out economic science. In the other, the art of government is divided in two: an economic art of government and a juridical art of government. In contrast to both these perspectives, liberalism tries to construct a space of governmentality in which economic and politico-legal subjectivity represent, in equal measure, relative components of a more comprehensive arrangement. In order to preserve a unified art of government, the general validity of its principles for the entirety of the sovereign’s realm, and the specificity and autonomy of the laws of political economy, it is necessary to assign a new object and a new sphere to the art of government, where its power might be exercised: civil society. Civil society provides the answer to the question of how to rule, in keeping with the law, a space of sovereignty inhabited by economic subjects.65
In the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of civil society received an entirely new meaning. Whereas, until mid-century (e.g. in the writings of Locke), it counted as a juridico-political structure, above all, a significant change now occurred: the equation between civil society and political society collapsed. Foucault illustrates the concept’s new dimension on the basis of Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1783).
First, Ferguson’s conception of (civil) society starts with a historico-natural constant: human beings have always existed in groups, thus it is meaningless to look at isolated loners or think in terms of a pre-societal war of all against all. The transition from nature to history, from non-society to society, never occurred. Human nature is historical ‘by nature’, and the ‘natural state’ of humankind is a social one.
The ‘naturalness’ of society cannot be boiled down to its legal or economic aspects. It represents far more than a mechanism for exchanging natural rights, or a space inhabited by economic subjects. The bonds between individuals that it establishes differ radically from legal obligations; at the same time, the sympathies and antipathies that find expression here derive from the egoistic pursuit of economic self-interest. These are the specifically ‘social’ relations (in contrast to politico-legal and economic ones) that form the basis for, and define the particularity of, civil society.
Second, Ferguson assigns an ambivalent position to economic ties as they bear on social bonds. On the one hand, economic exchange promotes relationships between individuals. On the other, economic links represent a constant source of danger. Time and again, individual, egoistic interests threaten to destroy the same civil society bonds they have fostered. Such ‘dissociative association’ also constitutes the vectors of a historical dynamic. Economic interplay and the self-serving pursuit of private interest introduce a historical dimension to the natural state of civil society: the same mechanisms that found it threaten it, maintain it and alter it. The historical process unfolds as the permanent formation and reformation of the social net along the lines of new economic structures and forms of government.
Third, in light of civil society’s immanent historicity, Ferguson posits the thesis that an ‘organic’ relationship holds between social bonds and political relations of power. Not only do the natural differences pervading civil society lead to new divisions of labour in the sphere of production; they do the same in the political realm. Even though the decisions made here represent group will as a whole, they do not represent each and every member; some people arrive at different conclusions. The quasi-natural existence of such relations of power, founded in varying personal qualities and individual aptitudes, precedes the institutionalized law that they then legitimate, limit or reinforce. In other words: before power is juridically established, it already exists in the form of spontaneous hierarchies and natural authorities. In Ferguson’s works, the problem of grounding or restricting power dissolves into the immanent historicity of civil society.66
At the same time, Ferguson’s conception of civil society occupies a site of historico-political intersection, which goes back to early liberal confrontation with an all-powerful state and its regulatory claims. The early eighteenth century witnessed the problem of how the centrifugal forces and non-totalizable diversity of economic subjects could be made to conform with the totalized unity of a legal-political realm of sovereignty. The liberal answer was to ‘invent’ a new politico-epistemological object and problematic, in whose sphere juridical and economic subjectivity could be situated: civil society. Civil society opened an autonomous realm of spontaneous regulation between economic interests and sovereign rights. Far more than a territory inhabited by a certain number of subjects, it constitutes a complex and independent reality with its own mechanisms and dependencies, which any and every legal order must take into account and accommodate.67
As such, civil society does not represent the counterpart of the state; it does not take form against the state, or in contrast to it, such that it is constantly threatened by state intervention or encroachment. Instead, it represents the correlative of the liberal technology of government. However, this does not mean that it lacks historical substance. For Foucault, civil society forms a ‘transactional reality’;68 it arises where different historical practices intersect. As such, the opposition between society and state does not represent a political universal, but a historical polarization on the basis of which liberalism functions. The strict polarity between state and society corresponds to the historical reality of the eighteenth century, and much of the nineteenth – as does the political role of the state as the centre for organizing power. For all that, this same line of division came to be abandoned time and again over the course of the nineteenth century.69
Before addressing nineteenth-century changes to governmentality, a few remarks are in order about the inner systematics and theoretical role of the material presented until now. Two items in particular are of consequence for the further course of argument: first, the complex relationship between freedom and security established by the liberal art of government, and, second, its delimitation with respect to earlier technologies of power.
In contrast to reason of state, the new art of government that started to emerge at the mid-eighteenth century did not aim only to maximize the state’s forces; rather, it pursued ‘economic government’. However, this historical shift did not reduce state power right away. A ‘natural’ limit was posited for state intervention, which had to count on the naturalness of social phenomena. This limit was not negative. Instead, the very naturalness of phenomena opened a sphere for possible interventions unknown until this point, which did not necessarily assume a regulatory form: ‘laissez-faire’, ‘stimulating’ and ‘promoting’ came to be more important than regulation, making decrees and ruling.70
The principle of ‘less government’, then, is not a quantitative phenomenon. Rather, it indicates a fundamental change in power mechanisms. The emergence of the liberal art of government implies establishing new forms of power, which differ from both sovereign right and disciplinary technologies. Their task is to frame ‘natural’ mechanisms in such a way that they may play out their naturalness without incurring damage. The institution of liberal freedoms cannot be separated from dispositives of security (dispositifs de sécurité) meant to ensure a certain use of liberty.71
Individuals and individual rights occupy the centre of liberal reflection, and the liberal art of government functions only inasmuch as it guarantees freedom. Yet freedom does not simply amount to the (negative) individual right to oppose power. Instead, law – or juridical institutions and mechanisms (such as ‘the rule of law’ and parliamentarism) – are historical instruments with the task of restricting the regulating claims of the absolutist state and securing a general procedural framework. As such, freedom is not identical with rights and the law; rather, they represent a vehicle of liberal government for consolidating liberty.72
It does not follow, however, that freedom represents an absolute value in the liberal art of government. Rather, it provides an instrument for the art of government inasmuch as it forms an indispensable component of governmentality and the (positive) basis for governmental action. In other words, liberalism does not reserve more pockets of freedom than other governmental practices; it does not limit itself to respecting one kind of liberty or another so much as it ‘consumes’ freedom. Freedom provides the crucial precondition for ‘economic’ government; it is the medium and instrument of governmental action – such that contempt for it not only violates the law but also signals fundamental ignorance about the purpose of governing in general.73
Accordingly, liberalism differs from earlier forms of government with respect to its mode of exercising power. It does not seek to dominate subjects directly or subjugate them, since their activity and freedom constitute the indispensable precondition for the liberal form of government and structure the concrete forms that exercising power assumes. Unlike earlier technologies of government, liberalism does not enlist constraint and violence so much as it presumes individual freedom. In other words, the freedom of individuals does not stand opposed to liberal governmentality but represents its necessary condition and central component.74
However, liberal interest in individual freedom does not correspond to lack of interest in coordination and regulation. On the contrary, the element of freedom heightens the need for balance and steering. In order for individual actions to be used for the purposes of government, it is necessary to lend the freedom of subjects a certain form. Liberalism can operationalize freedom only to the extent that it is able to determine a clearly delimited use for it. But to assert freedom in this form, it cannot make recourse to coercion and violence and must renounce implementing centralized power mechanisms of the state.
Liberal government concerns more than a simple legal guarantee of liberties existing independently of governmental practice. Liberalism organizes the conditions under which individuals are able to be free. In this context, freedom is not a given – instead, liberalism ‘fabricates’ or ‘produces’ freedom. But in the process of producing freedom, liberalism also imperils the very thing it creates. A problematic (and paradoxical) relationship emerges between freedom and its permanent endangerment: precisely because liberalism brings forth freedom ‘artificially’, it constantly risks restricting, or even destroying it. The liberal art of government enacts freedom that is fragile and constantly at risk – which therefore provides the basis for new interventions time and again.75
The problem for liberalism, then, concerns the extent to which the free pursuit of private interests threatens the general interest: how high are freedom’s ‘production costs’? Freedom cannot prevail without restriction, but must be subjected to a principle of calculation: security. So that the mechanics of interests and the dynamic of desire do not come to pose a danger for individuals and the collective, it is necessary to establish ‘mechanisms of security’. The latter represent the flipside of, and condition for, liberalism. Whether, like Bentham, one views freedom as a branch of security or does the opposite (deeming security a condition for freedom), freedom and security stand as the two poles of liberal governmentality:
the setting in place of mechanisms of security … mechanisms or modes of state intervention whose function is to assure the security of those natural phenomena, economic processes and the intrinsic processes of the population: this is what becomes the basic objective of governmental relationality. Hence liberty is registered not only as the right of individuals legitimately to oppose the power, the abuses and usurpations of the sovereign, but also now as an indispensable element of governmental rationality itself.76
Formerly, a vast array of legal and economic conditions existed, which obligated the sovereign to protect his subjects. But with liberalism it is no longer a matter of securing external protection for the individual; instead, the production of liberties and the pursuit of private interests are supposed to ensure that individuals and the collective stand exposed to as few dangers as possible. The inward relationship between freedom and security also sets liberal government apart from the police state, where security also holds a key position. In the latter case, however, the aim of the police is to establish safety by surveilling and steering processes of communication and exchange; the preferred instruments are disciplining individuals and tying them to the productive apparatus. According to Foucault, liberalism opts for another path, which takes distance from the universe of police: instead of trying to order all the processes that occur in the population, it seeks to take account of the population’s autonomous and necessarily opaque character.77 Such autonomy no longer represents something natural (as for the physiocrats), which regulates and stabilizes itself on its own; rather, it is something artificial – exposed to risk time and again and requiring security mechanisms in order to play out fully.78
Foucault’s discussion of security mechanisms provides one of his most important theoretical projects after Discipline and Punish; as such, it calls for re-evaluating the results of earlier studies. Two points warrant emphasis in particular. First, ‘security mechanisms’ concern a modality of power that differs from both sovereign power and disciplinary power. Second, ‘dispositives of security’ do not simply join the other mechanisms of power, nor do they relativize their meaning or take their place. Instead, the interest Foucault shows for ‘security mechanisms’ displaces the value attached to other forms of power, which entails a change in his assessment of disciplinary processes.
What is it that distinguishes security mechanisms from juridical mechanisms, on the one hand, and disciplinary mechanisms, on the other? For one, the objects are different: whereas the aim of sovereignty is to extend territorial space, and discipline focuses on the individual body, government takes aim at ‘population in general’.79 That said, the differences between these mechanisms only become clear in their different modes of operation, as Foucault illustrates on the basis of ways epidemics were treated from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.80
Historically, variant reactions to leprosy, plague and smallpox point to significant changes in perception and therapy. During the Middle Ages, sovereign power banished lepers from cities and operated through the binary division leprous/not-leprous. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, disciplinary power opted for another form of action towards plague: the sick were not banished; instead, affected urban quarters were quarantined in order to contain the affliction through police measures. Finally, eighteenth-century security technology met smallpox by way of concrete knowledge concerning the number and sites of infection, the age of people affected, mortality rates and so on.81
The example of smallpox permits Foucault to stress the difference between disciplinary mechanisms and security measures. Practices of inoculation developed to counter smallpox (fighting illness by controlled exposure to pathogens) heralded a break with received medical knowledge and required that entirely new concepts be elaborated. Illness no longer received treatment in moral-juridical terms, but as a natural fact distributed in the population as so many ‘cases’ admitting statistical analysis. Whereas disciplinary mechanisms had focused on illness itself and parties infected, security dispositives not only separate the healthy from the sick but treat the population as a whole, accepting a ‘normal’ rate of infection, mortality and so on.82
Like famine, illness is no longer understood in legal or disciplinary categories – and then met with ‘medical police’ – so much as it receives attention as an empirical fact. Accordingly, security mechanisms do not implement regulatory measures in order to prevent famine or disease. On the contrary: for eighteenth-century economists and physicians, reality is no longer what must be negated, but what cannot be prevented – and since it cannot be prevented, it must be reckoned with and calculated, in order to minimize its negative effects. In a seeming paradox, then, the shortage of foodstuffs gives rise to free markets and sickness leads to inoculating the population with pathogens.83
The different reactions to illness on the part of sovereignty, discipline and security point to varying concepts of the norm and the ‘normal’. Legal norms operated through laws that established and codified standards. Foucault’s works on discipline and his critique of the juridical model of power demonstrate how disciplinary technology exploited gaps in the legal mechanisms and ‘colonized’ the law.84 Discipline introduced a hierarchy distinguishing between the unsuitable and the suitable, the normal and the abnormal, and so on. Disciplinary technology worked by projecting an optimal model and then operationalizing it – that is, it implemented procedures for evaluating individuals on a standard and fitting them to it. The norm occupied the foreground; on this basis the normal was separated from the abnormal.85
Security technology represents the exact opposite of the disciplinary system. Whereas the latter starts with the norm, the security system starts with the (empirically) normal, which sets the standard enabling further distinctions to be made. Instead of evaluating reality in terms of a predefined norm, security technology makes reality itself the norm: statistical frequency, average rates of illness, birth and death, and so on. Discipline tends to regulate everything, and it must constantly intervene in order to change reality. In contrast, ‘dispositives of security’ make given reality the point of departure and try to work within its parameters. They do not draw absolute lines of separation between what is permitted and what is forbidden, but specify an optimal middle ground within a spectrum.86
The analytical distinction between the different modes of operation of sovereignty, discipline and security prompts Foucault to change his overall picture. In contrast to earlier studies, which opposed disciplinary normalization to the legal norm, he now reserves the term normalization for designating mechanisms of security. He recognizes that law and discipline have the same premise: neither one starts out with what is normal in descriptive terms; instead, they both operate prescriptively. Accordingly, Foucault places, alongside the legal norm, disciplinary normation, which he in turn distinguishes from the normalization performed by security technology:
Due to the primacy of the norm in relation to the normal, to the fact that disciplinary normalization goes from the norm to the final division between the normal and the abnormal, I would rather say that what is involved in disciplinary techniques is a normation (normation) rather than normalization.87
Discussing ‘dispositives of security’, Foucault observes that critique of the juridical conception of power also applies to the disciplinary mechanisms he once used to demonstrate the ‘productivity of power’. Inasmuch as it makes the norm the point of departure, disciplinary technology shares the negative code of law, whose limitations for analysing social power now are evident. Foucault concludes that modern societies’ tendency towards normalization is not restricted to training individuals and orienting them on a single model. Now, compared to ‘dispositives of security’, he finds discipline to be a singularly ‘uneconomical’ and ‘archaic’88 form of power. As such, his power analytics no longer assigns disciplinary regulation a position opposite to the juridical principle; instead, the line of demarcation runs between (positive) security mechanisms and the (negative) ‘juridical-disciplinary system’.89
Foucault adds a historical and a political thesis to his analytical distinction between various power mechanisms. The political thesis consists of relativizing the significance of disciplinary processes in contemporary, liberal-capitalist societies. In the early 1970s, Foucault still stressed the increasing disciplination of society; now, he declares that, in the ‘general economy of power’, the dominance of juridical mechanisms has shifted, via disciplinary mechanisms, to security mechanisms. By this assessment, we are not living in a state of law or a disciplinary society so much as in what one might call a ‘security society’: juridical and disciplinary mechanisms are increasingly subordinated to ‘dispositives of security’.90
However, this historical process of transformation does not mean dismantling power mechanisms, nor is it simply a matter of new technologies of power being added on. Rather, modification occurs affecting power mechanisms and their relation to each other. Instead of making them superfluous, the government problematic intensifies questions concerning the conditions of sovereignty and drives the disciplines forward. In the first place, the end of traditional schemes of justification motivated by religion or natural law exacerbates questions about the limits and foundations of political sovereignty. Second, governing the population demands detailed, comprehensive and fundamental leadership; this makes discipline more necessary than ever, inasmuch as they are supposed to function as the counterpart, and completion, of newly won liberties. And so, ‘security society’ does not represent the end point of a historical development – whereby a society of sovereignty yields to disciplinary society, which in turn gives way to a society of governmentality. Instead, it amounts to a ‘triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security’.91
Yet the schematic distinction between three technologies of power poses a problem inasmuch as it suggests that we are still living under the conditions of eighteenth-century, liberal governmentality – which have remained unchanged for some 200 years.92 Foucault demonstrates in concrete, historical terms, that liberal rationality changed decisively in the course of the nineteenth century, and he points to substantial differences between early liberal thinking of the eighteenth century and neoliberal ideas of the twentieth. These transformations of liberal governmentality form the object of chapters 8 and 9.93